Jeff Robbins, PhD, honored with Procter Medallion
Jeff Robbins, PhD, executive co-director of the Heart Institute, and director, Molecular Cardiovascular Biology, received the William Cooper Procter Medallion on January 23 at a dinner celebrating his career and achievements. The Procter Medallion is the highest honor bestowed by Cincinnati Children’s and recognizes the medical center’s greatest contributors to improving child health.
The award is the latest of many over the course of Robbins’ 45-year career, including the Louis and Artur Lucian Award for research in circulatory disease; the Presidential Award from the International Society of Heart Research; and the prestigious Research Achievement Award, given annually by the American Heart Association.
Robbins is known as the “father of cardiac transgenesis.” His work led to the development of reagents that are used for manipulating the heart. These reagents have helped scientists understand the actions of proteins responsible for human cardiac disease and design effective therapies. Robbins has also focused on understanding the behavior of both normal and disease-causing proteins that impact the heart’s ability to work. Thousands of other investigators have effectively leveraged his data and reagents to advance their own research careers.
Boundless curiosity
As early as he can remember, Robbins loved asking questions and playing with chemicals and microscopes. “I liked constructing things. Two childhood presents that stand out in my mind are a chemistry set and a Gilbert erector set – with a big motor,” he says. “The more power, the better!”
Growing up in a New York suburb on Long Island Sound, Robbins’ desire to understand how things worked led him to decide on a career as a scientist by the time he reached high school. During that time, he got his first taste of the scientific life when he started his first research project, volunteering as a lab assistant at a nearby university, growing paramecia.
While pursuing his undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester, he was almost arrested for refusing to leave a lab when the university closed for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Robbins attended graduate school at the University of Connecticut and completed his PhD in 1976. His postdoctoral work brought him to the University of Cincinnati, where he studied under Jerry Lingrel, PhD. “My career path was clear to me and others,” Robbins says. “I would be a ‘lab rat,’ asking questions, building constructs within molecular genetics and defining new mechanisms that explained how things worked.”
After his fellowship here, Robbins was recruited for an assistant professorship at the University of Missouri-Columbia College of Medicine, where he was part of the effort to build a new Department of Molecular Biochemistry.
Never one to grow too comfortable, Robbins left his tenured position to return to the University of Cincinnati. Says Robbins, “I came back to Cincinnati as a faculty member. However, in 1993, I was going to leave the city and go into discovery research at Wyeth Ayerst when Jeff Whitsett and the new chair of Pediatrics, Tom Boat, convinced me to come over to Cincinnati Children’s to start a new division devoted to enhancing the basic science foundations for pediatric cardiology.
“At the time, I was firmly devoted to very basic science, but in my first presentation to the Research and Education Board, Geoffrey Place, who chaired that committee, asked an unexpected question, ‘How will this help child health?’ I replied, ‘Well, I honestly haven’t really thought about that,’ which probably was not the best answer. I’ll never forget his next sentence, ‘All that we’re asking is that you ought to try.’ And I have.”
So began the creation of a small but very focused division – the Division of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology – that gained national and international stature.
Building a legacy
As Robbins’ interest increased in translating basic research data into clinically relevant practices, he formed the Sports Medicine program in 2002, recruiting a former research fellow to head the initiative. The success of this program, which led to the formation of Cincinnati Children’s Division of Sports Medicine, firmly invested Robbins in the translation of his work to the patients of the medical center.
In 2008, Robbins founded the Heart Institute at Cincinnati Children’s. Under his leadership, and with the help of his executive co-directors, it has grown into one of the premier pediatric heart centers in the world. The Heart Institute team has pioneered many advances in pediatric cardiology, including a first-in-the-nation ventricular assist device (VAD) in a Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patient, numerous transcatheter interventional therapies, echocardiography of complex cardiac malformations and the evaluation of cardiac disease during exercise stress.
With more than 250 publications to his name, Robbins’ contributions have changed the way we explore the basic pathology of heart disease, and his research into new therapeutic targets is changing the lives of children and adults alike.
Says Robbins, “Since starting in academics, I’ve steered my career using three dictates:
- If not now, when?
- You can do well by doing good and
- You never lose anything by giving it away.
“These dictates encapsulate my motivations for being at Cincinnati Children’s and have driven my actions while we built Molecular Cardiovascular Biology, then Sports Medicine and ultimately, the Heart Institute, where clinical practice, service and research were seamlessly integrated into a coherent, singular administrative entity. For each one of these efforts, senior leadership, together with the administrative and support infrastructures, provided everything and more than anyone could ask for.”
Robbins is grateful to be at the medical center, practicing medicine, doing research and developing new tools to make lives better. “Cincinnati Children’s was and is an exciting place. Our ability to do extraordinary things is not limited by the resources. The only limitations are those that are self-imposed. There is no other place in the world where I could have accomplished what today defines my career,” he says.
“It is humbling for a PhD to be able to impact clinical practice while still pursuing discovery. There has never been a better time to do research that can alter and improve clinical practice, and there is no better place to do it than right here in Cincinnati.”
